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easily or soon, nor would Brahms’s fantasies about Julie. Meanwhile the Bremen premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem loomed in the spring of 1868, keeping him keyed up. Some two weeks before Good Friday in Bremen came another significant occasion when the F Minor Piano Quintet (reworked from the string quintet and the two-piano sonata) had its world premiere in Paris. At the piano with the Erard group on that occasion was Luise Japha, now Dr. Langhans-Japha, Brahms’s friend from his teens and maybe the first lady pianist exempted from his scorn. Luise had found Brahms himself a chore and they had not kept up a friendship, but she had not forgotten his music as she made a distinguished career as a pianist in France. A decade before, Clara had not dared to play his music in public on her first visit to Paris. That country and Brahms still did not suit each other, but this first important French premiere, and a well-received one, at least sustained a presence for his work in a country he never considered visiting.

The F Minor Piano Quintet is often called the crown of his chamber music. Brahms scholar Michael Musgrave calls it Beethovenian in its intensity, Schubertian in its lyrical moments; that combination is the essence of Brahms’s full maturity.71 In expression the quintet ranges from the high-Romantic passion and drama of the first movement, to a lushly lyrical slow movement, to a demonic scherzo and dashing finale. It also carries his familiar techniques to a higher level of thoroughness and mastery. Like the G Minor Piano Quartet, the F Minor begins with a pregnant theme in octaves, of great import to the piece.

But this theme is more varied and songlike than the skeletal opening of the G Minor; despite its quietness it has a coiled-spring intensity that resonates to the end of the piece. The way it will dominate the four movements in all its moods is revealed immediately, when with an explosive gesture like a spring releasing, Brahms transforms the flowing beginning into a passionately surging piano line made by speeding up the opening theme:

The F-G-A♭ of the opening echoes all the way to the main theme of the last movement, which begins with the same notes. The triadic motives of the opening theme resonate through the piece as well. Yet Brahms gives priority to the simple half-step outline G-A♭ and D-C (the latter first heard with an intervening F). That half-step relationship not only dominates the thematic work throughout the quintet, but has large-scale implications too. In earlier works Brahms integrated the dimensions of melody and harmony; now he moves another step toward the future by conflating tiny motivic elements with local harmonic structures and with large-scale tonal ones: the melodic half steps of his themes extend into a series of key changes moving by half step; the blisteringly intense scherzo is full of melodic semitones including the driving Phrygian D-Cs at the end, but also startling harmonic changes based on half-step part movement. (The Phrygian is the “E-mode,” one of the old ecclesiastical scales that were common before Western music settled into using major and minor scales almost exclusively. Phrygian can be thought of as minor with a poignant lowered second degree: in effect darker than minor, and as such a favored color of Brahms’s when he indulged in modal touches.)

Nearly a century later, Arnold Schoenberg wrote his article “Brahms the Progressive” partly to claim that the essence of his own twelve-tone method—that everything in the music, from melody to harmony to the overall pitch structure derives from a single twelve-note thematic kernel called a row—is the culmination of a progressive development in musical thought epitomized by Brahms. Mainly Schoenberg was thinking of the unification of the “horizontal”/melodic with the “vertical”/harmonic, and the extension of that logic into the larger structure of a piece. Brahms demonstrated that idea masterfully in works including the F Minor Quintet.

At the same time, in this piece Brahms carries on his metric and formal innovations,